Archived Booklists

2013

2013 was a pretty rough year health-wise, and I guess it shows: I wasn't capable of reading a lot, but then I didn't really track what I did read. I watched every James Bond movie but Diamonds Are Forever, though.
    1. The Left Hand of Darkness - Paul Hoffman.
    2. The Family Trade - Charles Stross.
    3. The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross.
    4. The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross.
    5. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross.
    6. Roger Zelazny's The dawn of Amber. Book 1 / John Gregory Betacourt.
    7. The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria. It took me a while to characterize: it's a book-length Economist article. Not a bad one, but not deep or anything. 
    8. Tiassa - Steven Brust. Muddled compared to his best work, but Brust obviously had fun writing it, and that shines through.
    9. Tibet: A History - Sam van Schaik. Really excellent: shows how there are no simple narratives around Tibet.
    10. The Last Four Things - Paul Hoffman.

    2012

    I expect more books on leadership and team management, what with my new responsibilities at work. Hopefully I'll finish ongoing reads like Huckleberry Finn.
      1. The Control of Nature - John McPhee. From 1989, this has 3 long sections: the effort to control the Mississippi River, to control lava flows in Iceland and Hawaii, and to control debris flows from the erosion of the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles. Short version: humans are insane.
      2. Excession - Iain M. Banks. Challenging in spots, but good, with a lot of interesting insights about the Culture.
      3. Fluke - Christopher Moore. Classic Moore, funny but not his best.
      4. Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity - Bruce Bawer. Amazing! It explains so much of modern America.
      5. Surface Detail - Iain M. Banks. I love his Culture novels, but this was sort of meh. The only good character is a psychopathic ship. So it goes: we can't hit home runs every time. The last page is stunningly, inexplicably, mind-bogglingly stupid: read Use of Weapons first and you'll know why.
      6. The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins. First one is gripping, second one is much slower.
      7. God's Problem - Bart D. Ehrman. Subtitled "How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer," this is not as satisfyingly coherent as his other books. This might be because it's personal for him: the problem of suffering is how he lost his Christian faith. It's a solid overview of the various Biblical responses to suffering, though it's all academic to me because I have my own view of suffering that I think holds up quite well.
      8. The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy - Clare B. Dunkle. This is some grade-A fucked-up stuff. The language is simple, but the concepts are way beyond what younger kids can imagine: one group gently treats its terrified captured brides, another beats and abuses its women before they inevitably die in childbirth. Kids know their own lack of control and influence over their lives, but can they really understand the process of coming to terms and accepting the circumstances forced on you when you have no choice? When you're forcibly torn away from your entire world? I doubt it.
      9. The "His Dark Materials" Trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife,  The Amber Spyglass- Phillip Pullman. It's not actually anti-religion at all. As one friend says, "It's worse than that: it's anti-Church."
      10. King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard. So racist! (South Africa, future home of apartheid, in the 1800s.) But a solid adventure read aside from that.
      11. A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs.
      12. Jesus, Interrupted - Bart Ehrman. Bearing the somewhat incendiary subtitle "Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)"; I assume it's his editor that makes these up. Lots of reference to the reactions to his earlier Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem.
      13. The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 - Chris Wickham. Another long-term project. First two-thirds is sparkling, the last bogs down in details of Frankish court intrigues among dozens of people with similar or identical names.
      14. God and Man At Yale - William F. Buckley. Epic whingefest!
      15. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain. Finally! I forgot how boring the second half is.
      16. Look to Windward - Iain M. Banks. A lot of exposition and pondering about the Culture, and about grief, loss, redemption, and responsibility.
      17. The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks. I'm a sucker for his Culture novels, but this one is particularly delicious.
      18. Managing Humans - Michael Lopp. I learned a lot from this, especially the degree to which, as a team lead, my job is to pass on information to the team.
      19. The Professor and the Madman - Simon Winchester. About the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't know if there's a book-worthwhile story in there, but in any case, it's poorly told.

      2011

      Buh, Blogger somehow reverted this page to an earlier version. I'll do what I can, but I'm not going to bother with adding my opinions.

      I read a lot of books, usually far more than I can remember or even reconstruct from my library records. For 2011 it might be interesting to catalog the things I read. Some of these I started in December 2010, but we'll let that slide.

      Expect to see a lot of public-domain literature on the list: I suddenly realized that Project Gutenberg has endless thousands of free books I've never read, and now in the iPad I finally have a comfortable way to read them.

      1. The Five Dysfunctions of A Team - Patrick Lencioni.
      2. Dzur - Steven Brust.
      3. Issola - Steven Brust.
      4. Dragon - Steven Brust.
      5. A Dance With Dragons - George R.R. Martin.
      6. A Feast For Crows - George R.R. Martin.
      7. A Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin.
      8. A Clash of Kings - George R.R. Martin.
      9. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin.
      10. Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll.
      11. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson.
      12. Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling - Ross King. Not quite as sparklingly awesome as Brunelleschi's Dome, but then again I'm just less interested in art than in architecture and engineering. Still, awesome story all around.
      13. 1491: New Revelations of the World Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann. Oh, man. Go read this book. It's on my History Shortlist with Jared Diamond's books. Short version: everything you were taught is wrong.
      14. Zen Wrapped In Karma Dipped In Chocolate - Brad Warner. My first Kindle book! I bought it because Warner needs the money and I didn't want to carry around a library book. Part One of his "Here are the grotesque details of how Zen teachers like me are human just like everybody else" confessional series.
      15. Dracula - Bram Stoker. It's really, really good. Set aside your previous vampire-fiction experiences: I got to the end and thought "Wow, that would make a horrible movie." I have some reading to do on the novel's background: did you know Stoker was Irish?
      16. Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Mark Richardson. I gave up midway through, it was so boring. Get it from the library if you must. Don't you dare buy this book.
      17. Confession of A Buddhist Atheist - Stephen Batchelor. So awesome. I'd listened to about 25 hours of his lectures from 2005-2010, and this is the book that came out of them. It's a really excellent way of reading the oldest Buddhist texts, to try and get a view of the human story behind it.
      18. Riding the Ox Home - John Daido Loori.
      19. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne. Very surprised to discover hard sci-fi from 1863. This means that when it's wrong, it's very obviously wrong, but with some caveats, it's not wrong that often.
      20. Daisy Miller - Henry James. After years of hearing about how awesome Henry James is, I finally gave him a try, and holy crap.
      21. Keep Me In Your Heart A While: The Haunting Zen of Dainin Katagiri - Dosho Michael Port. Katagiri Roshi's students don't appear to have written many books with stories about him, so this is a special book in that way. Interesting illustrations of how the people we're separated from continue in our memories.
      22. Scalable Internet Architectures - Theo Schlossnagle. A modern classic for nerds.
      23. The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt - John Ray. Short and sweet.
      24. Out of the Flames - Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. Excellent book by a pair of book collectors, about the antitrinitarian Michael Servetus and the 3 surviving copies of the book that was burned at the stake with him.
      25. The Sandman Library - Neil Gaiman. It's very 90s, unsurprisingly, but it's still a good story and a really accessible intro to comics/graphic novels.
      26. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition - Daniel Okrent. Absolutely phenomenal.
      27. Surprised By Joy - C.S. Lewis

      2010

      Counting only books finished in 2010. Some books were boring, or I didn't finish them.
      1. Dating Jesus: a story of fundamentalism, feminism, and the American girl - Susan Campbell
      2. Brightness Reef - David Brin
      3. Infinity's Shore - David Brin
      4. Heaven's Reach - David Brin
      5. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism - Chogyam Trungpa
      6. A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
      7. The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition - James William Coleman
      In March I left for Chile, so the book selection widens a bit, depending on what was available.
      1. Reading Lolita In Tehran - Azar Nafisi (Mostly interesting as a portrait of Iran before and after the revolution, unless you like fiction more than I do.)
      2. Soldiers In A Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime In Chile - Mary Helen Spooner. (Excellent.)
      3. Tasting Chile - Daniel Joelson (A Chilean cookbook. Said one Chilean: "It's very small. I'm surprised anyone would write a book about it.")
      4. Zen In America - Helen Tworkov (Very outdated, not recommended except as history.)
      5. Santiago's Children - Steve Reifenberg
      6. My Invented Country - Isabel Allende
      7. Devil In the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness At the Fair That Changed America - Erik Larson
      8. Siddartha - Herman Hesse (Awesome.)
      9. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho (Oprah Winfrey follow-your-bliss simplistic pseudo-spiritual pablum.)
      10. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
      11. The Shack  - William P. Young

      2009

      1. A Blessing of Bread: The Many Rich Traditions of Jewish Bread Baking Around the World - Maggie Glezer
      2. Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes - Jeffrey Hamelman
      3. Japan's Ultimate Martial Art: Jujitsu Before 1882, the Classical Japanese Art of Self-Defense - Darrell Max Craig
      4. The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe From 400 to 1000 - Chris Wickham (Didn't quite finish it--it's extremely dense.)
      5. The Seven Storey Mountain - Thomas Merton
      6. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language - John H. McWhorter
      7. The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, His Own - David Carr
      8. Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All - Perry Garfinkel
      9. Teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language: A Teacher Self-Development and Methodology Guide - Jerry G. Gebhard
      10. One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism - Joseph Goldstein
      11. Waking Up: A Week Inside a Zen Monastery - Jack Maguire
      12. The Steel Remains - Richard K. Morgan
      13. What Makes Us Catholic: Eight Gifts for Life - Thomas H. Groome
      14. Fight: Or, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking But Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking - Eugene Robinson
      15. Fables: The Dark Ages - Bill Willingham
      16. Fables. v. 11, War and Pieces - Bill Willingham
      17. Sitting Still - Patricia Hart Clifford
      18. Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen - Christopher McDougall
      19. Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler
      20. Meetings With Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America - Lenore Friedman
      21. Use of Weapons - Iain M. Banks
      22. Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks
      23. Matter - Iain M. Banks
      24. The Food of a Younger Land - ed. Mark Kurlansky 
      25. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle - Daniel L. Everett
      26. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes - Tamim Ansary
      27. Why I Am a Catholic - Garry Wills
      28. Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies & The Truth About Reality - Brad Warner
      29. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit - Garry Wills
      30. The Catholic Imagination - Andrew Greeley
      31. In Search of Zarathustra: The First Prophet and the Ideas That Changed the World - Paul Kriwaczek
      32. Shaker: Life, Work, and Art - June Sprigg and David Larkin
      33. The Lost Gospel: The book of Q & Christian Origins
      34. Warm Smiles From Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation - Reb Anderson
      35. All Is Change: The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West - Lawrence Sutin
      36. The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam - Jonathan Riley-Smith.
      37. Cave In the Snow: Tenzin Palmo's Quest for Enlightenment - Vicki Mackenzie
      38. What the Buddha Never Taught - Tim Ward
      39. How Starbucks Saved My Life - Michael Gates Gill
      40. Emergency - Neil Strauss
      41. Elric, the Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock
      42. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism - John Powers
      43. Out of Gas: The end of the age of oil - David Goodstein
      44. Walden - Henry David Thoreau (Well, I tried and failed. It's quotable, but not very well written.)
      45. American Shaolin: flying kicks, buddhist monks, and the legend of iron crotch: an odyssey in the new China - Matthew Polly
      46. You Suck: A Love Story - Christopher Moore
      47. A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore

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